


Love Poem

by pontchartrain



Category: Persona 4
Genre: M/M, post-chisato recovery fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-04
Updated: 2015-07-04
Packaged: 2018-04-07 16:04:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 4,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4269522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pontchartrain/pseuds/pontchartrain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"How could it work </i>
  <br/>
  <i>when all those years he stored his widowed heart</i>
  <br/>
  <i>as though the dead came back."</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**I.**

Dojima is halfway through his scheduled work day when Uehara approaches him, wearing the grave face he usually reserves for notifying housewives of husbands’ accidents.

Uehara is a squat, gray-faced man who Dojima can’t say he likes: though their encounters have always been brief Dojima internally accuses him of suffering from a deplorable lack of personality. Dojima expects Uehara to pass him by as he always does, and gives him a silent, preemptive nod to expedite the process.

But Uehara does not brush past him, as per office protocol. Instead he grinds to a halt before Dojima and looks at him, sadly and a little uncertainly and not entirely without fear.

“Dojima, sir, you might want to take a seat."

* * *

 Accident. Hit-and-run. Cold trail. No witnesses.

 Dojima crumbles, sick and sad and  _alone_  in ways he’d always figured the wedding vows would protect him from. 

* * *

When he pulls himself together enough to pick up his daughter – whose mouth is taut with worry but otherwise betrays nothing of her long hours alone – he holds her crushingly close. The display is more for his benefit than hers. She is too young to understand the enormity of what’s happened, and Dojima’s in too many pieces to try to explain; all he is capable of doing in that moment is holding the singular piece of Chisato he has left.

Bringing Nanako home marks the start of his first black weeks; they are bad for all the reasons he’s expected and worse for ones he hasn’t yet braced for. He has never before registered before how much of his routine revolved around her; how all of his rituals are built to accommodate two. Having always been safe and sound in his own domestic bubble, Dojima has only ever abstractly considered the possibility of being left alone. He has never so much as entertained the destructive possibility of having no-one greet him when he wakes each morning or having no sing-song chirp answer his habitual, “I’m home”.

The period after her death is punctuated by _lapses_ \- periods in which he forgets, for the briefest of instants, the crushing fact of his loneliness.

* * *

On one of his first mornings alone he finds himself lapsing into habit, brewing coffee for two. Realization catches him off-guard and the mug he is holding falls to the ground and shatters, but not quite before he does.

* * *

 Halfway through his first week of loss he realizes that there are things around the house that need to be done, and he figures that the physical labour might offer him distraction, might keep the worst of his grief at bay. He can’t bring himself to clean their room – he maintains it just as it is, tomb-like, despite it being as sick as it sounds – so he moves on to laundry: a harmless enough task, or so he thinks.

Until he finds her clothes in the washer, twisted out of shape at the basin's bottom, and succumbs to a paroxysm of sadness and shock.

* * *

However bad these first few nights, the worst by far are the ones where he pours himself drinks, the strongest shochu his stomach can stand, because these are the days he talks to the ghost. He natters on for hours to a woman that isn’t there – about work and his absence from it, about Inaba and its ratio of crooks to cops – but mostly he stakes, in a brittle, wounded chirp, the conclusion he came to the second Uehara from the force told him his wife was gone:  
      
            “they put the wrong one of us in the ground, Chisato.”  
  
He is a mess no-one wants to clean up; maybe no-one knows  _how_.


	2. Chapter 2

**II.**

Sometimes he has mornings where he is more-or-less capable of functioning – days where he showers and almost completes his shave, days where he nearly makes it through a breakfast of black coffee before succumbing to grief. Some of these days he is able to tear himself away from he and Chisato’s shared tomb and face Inaba, but he is never allowed to forget that he does so all by his awful lonesome. 

The whole town whispers about him. Most don’t have the courtesy to do it behind his back, so on his biweekly trips to Junes he catches his name in what are  _supposed_  to be clandestine whispers.

Overhearing the gossip about him is manageable;

catching mention of Chisato is far less so.

She used to love Inaba for its sense of community – and maybe he had, too. Back when he shared it with Chisato, he’d been sold on her vision of Inaba: one of a harmless collection of blacktop and smiling neighbors. These days, though, that selfsame Inaba make his skin crawl, however well-intentioned its residents may be. 

Dojima would leave if there were anywhere else for him, but he is bound to this place

by a shameful combination of duty and memory.

* * *

By the year’s end you can bracelet his wrists with a thumb and a pinkie, and when he wears his old clothes, no part of him touches the fabric on the inside.

His first winter without her is the coldest in Inaba’s history.


	3. Chapter 3

**III.**

When sufficient time has passed, Dojima goes back to the force. 

Walking into the office after his extended period of absence is a lot like walking into it for the very first time. He is spared any feeling of joy or bright-eyed wonder, but he is not exempt from a feeling of sheer surreality; some part of him can hardly believe that he’s here.

Dojima spends his first day in a strange headspace where his limbs don’t feel like his: he quakes as he crosses the room and is shaky long after he descends into his chair. He simply doesn’t know how to  _be_  without her, and he means that in a raw, physical way as much as he does any psychological one.

Over the course of the day, Dojima’s fellow officers move about, subscribing to the routine hustle and bustle of police work – and as they go about their business, Dojima distinctly feels as if they are not brushing past but  _through_  him. It’s as if he’s been rendered as much of a ghost as she –

no.

He can’t go there. Not today.

* * *

Upon his return, Dojima puts too much of himself into his work. Plunging himself into case files and investigation – the only constants between his pre- and post-Chisato worlds – are means by which he can forget himself, means by which he’s granted momentary normalcy. His job means he doesn’t have to cope; he can use his work as an excuse to further his obsession. He’s running away – from grief and ghosts and a daughter he can’t seem to help disappointing – but as long as work comes in sufficient volume, he’s capable of functioning.

Years down the line he will be saying that what he did was for Nanako’s benefit, that the attempts to track down Chisato’s killer have been for their greater good. Years down the line he will know that he is wrong and that he always has been, that he has loved his job all wrong.

Over time, though, his coworkers start to see him again. Being granted that sole, microscopic courtesy – of having his existence acknowledged – fools him into thinking that everything might be okay again.


	4. Chapter 4

**IV.**

The following January, Dojima starts to put her things away. For too long Chisato has haunted this place in the things she left behind – old photos, sundresses, magazines. The former he can’t bear to part with – he sets them to rest in secreted corners, or folds them away in his room in places beyond Nanako’s reach – but the vast majority of it goes to goodwill, with only a sparse string of items exempt from his cleaning frenzy: a dog-eared diary; her jewelry collection; a coffee mug of hers that, by virtue of being tucked in the back of a kitchen cupboard, manages to escapes his vigil.

Chisato’s death, the fact that she existed at all – those are his burdens to bear, he decides. Nanako is still young and her memory of these trying times is prone to erasure; he decides that if he can eradicate any hint of her mother’s existence he will also eradicate her loss.

He doesn’t know it yet, but it’s an act that only renders them both more lonely.

* * *

Years pass without his permission, and it’s 2012 before Dojima knows it. It’s strange, Dojima thinks, how his little rituals of distraction have managed to whittle years away, and stranger still that he has stayed largely the same.

He gets a little grayer every winter, maybe, and his reliance on take-out dinners puts a couple pounds back where they belong. While the differences in his health are all external, the Dojima household celebrates any improvement it can get.    

In spring, though, things get shaken up. Dojima gets word that he’ll be assigned a transfer – some sort of city slicker, some sort of former hotshot. Dojima isn’t sure how to react: as a man fond of sameness and ritual, he is biased against the prospect of A New Guy from the start.

When Adachi tumbles into the Inaba PD headquarters for the first time, it confirms every one of his woes. Adachi is ten minutes late due to circumstances he (emphatically) claims are “beyond his control”, and though he apologizes profusely between ragged panting and bows, Dojima feels so deeply and irrationally affronted by the kid’s amiss tie and goddamn weed-whacker haircut that he chews him out before his superiors have so much as said one word. 

Dojima can’t recount exactly what he shouts, only its essence – what he had screamed at Adachi was the kind of “kids these days” spiel that growing up he’d promised never to make utterance of – but he knows that he has overstepped his authority. To Ichihara, he offers a wholehearted apology; Adachi, on the other hand, receives a reluctant, “sorry”, pushed out of the side of his mouth. On the day they’re introduced, and for a long time after, looking at Adachi –   _really_  looking at him, behind his rumpled suit or loose smile – will make his insides roil.

* * *

Those first weeks with Adachi deepen the worry lines around his mouth, carve sallow trenches in his cheeks and a permanent furrow in his brow. He works a lot of overtime trying to pick up the pieces his rookie partner leaves behind. When he appears before Nanako in these days it’s in flashes and samples wherein he is either bemoaning his misfortune or passed out on the sofa.

Adachi forgets simple things, like retrieving the report you'd asked him for only minutes ago and whether you wanted cream in your coffee – Dojima never does – and as a result Dojima expends enormous effort on not wringing his subordinate’s neck.

But what Adachi lacks in professional competence he makes up for in touching rituals of friendship.

The first to cling to Dojima’s memory occurs in Adachi’s third week on the force. It’s twenty past eight and there are all the signs of this being another all-nighter. Uehara’s tending to some tedious lost-and-found inventory, Ichihara has spirited away on patrol, and Adachi is putting on another pot of coffee when he turns to him and suddenly insists that he’ll do tonight’s paperwork if Dojima  _just gets home_. 

Dojima is suspicious of the courtesy being extended to him - it has been months since the last of his coworkers' pity dried up, and any and all acts of professional kindness with it - and he is reduced to wondering if Adachi trying to usurp his position, if he thinks old Dojima has lost the last of his competence.

Unable to determine what Adachi’s angle is, Dojima assumes the worst, and blows his top for the umpteenth time since Tohru’s arrival. “You think I can’t do my  _job_ , Adachi?”

Turns out Dojima’s fatal flaw is assuming Adachi had an angle at all. 

“N-n-not at all, sir.” He stammers, his whole body quaking with the combined force of eight cups of coffee and the weight of Dojima’s accusations. “It’s just – I can’t help feeling that Nanako needs her dad tonight.”

* * *

The second incident is more heavily ingrained in Adachi's memory than in Dojima's, but is important nevertheless, occurring on one of the nights Dojima really lets himself go down at Shiroku. He is distraught to have made such little progress in their case – a string of robberies with precious few leads – and copes the only way he knows: by not coping at all. 

More observant than he appears, Adachi is the type to recognize the signs of an impending disaster when he sees them, and it is quite apparent that Dojima has been on the brink of a breakdown all day. It’s ordinary for Dojima to emit a level of weary expertise – it comes with the turf; most policemen do – but today it has veered into full-blown haggardness: darkness has pooled all day in the crags of his face, the black craters of his eyes, and he has shaken when he thought no-one had been looking in an uneven rhythm that caffeine jitters can’t fully account for.

As a result, Adachi has known long before stepping foot into Shiroku that he will find Dojima there.

When Adachi finds him, Dojima is bent in a curve over a cup of shochu. He is equipped to do some serious hepatic damage, if not wholly intent on it: he throws the drinks back like water and leaves a graveyard of glassware in his wake. Adachi watches as Shiroku’s overworked part-time dishwasher tries his best to remove Dojima’s glasses while engaging him in a minimum of conversation. It is an act the Shiroku mistress will inevitably berate him for later, but in the dishwasher’s defense, very few people are capable of handling Dojima as he is now. 

The seats are vacant on the detective's either side – no surprise, as Dojima is that archetypal hollow drunk that most people are keen on avoiding – so Adachi slinks in on his right.

It takes a moment for Dojima to register Adachi on his radar – he is so mired in self-misery that registering much beyond himself or his drink takes time – but even when he does, he makes no move to correct his pitiful posture. Instead, he eyes Adachi from a pitiful worm’s-eye view, seeing little more to his subordinate than the basin of his chin and clavicles. He smiles by means of apology, knowing that this is neither the first nor the last time Adachi will see him so low.

He tells Adachi – despite being in a state where he should not be telling anyone  _anything_   – that he thinks maybe this case is retribution for his inability to save his wife. His own damned incompetence is what brought this crimewave to Inaba; this is his penance.

“This is all my fault.”

“Sir.”  Adachi doesn’t get much farther than that, and how could he? The enormity of Dojima’s pain isn’t something that can be breached with words. Adachi opts instead to place a hand on his shoulder, and when he does, feels Dojima break beneath that meager weight.

Four years of pain unravel entirely under Adachi’s thumb and forefinger in a release that Dojima has always needed but has been unsure how to ask for.

When Adachi’s sure that Dojima has recovered, he places a five thousand yen note on the counter, weighing the pros and cons of this generosity as he escorts the man back home.

By March's end, they have settled into routine. Once a week, they hunker down in the office, split a pot of coffee between them and pull an all-nighter. It doesn’t matter that on these nights, Dojima gets radically more work done than Adachi, that most of the time they are working they don’t exchange one solitary word, or that most of the following mornings Dojima spends copious amounts of time editing Adachi’s reports; these nights are good in that Dojima is not alone in them.


	5. Chapter 5

**V.**

Things are stable until they’re not, like when Dojima receives a call from his sister in April. She and her husband will be going abroad a year for business purposes - to  _America_ , and the way she says it is so rife with pride and giddiness that he teases her about being fifteen again.

He is happy for her, and says as much, up until he registers how, with his godparent status, this phone call means something in particular to him.

"What about Souji?" He asks, despite his better knowledge.

"You see, that's where you come in..." 

Dojima dutifully meets him at the trainstation mere weeks later, where he finds his once-familiar nephew has grown lousy with formality.

* * *

It’s not as if Dojima has much time to mourn his nephew becoming a stranger, though, and there is even less time to help Souji get settled: a call from work pulls him away before Souji has so much as unpacked his bags, and he does not bear witness to the insurmountable awkwardness that comprises what was  _supposed_  to be Souji's welcoming night.

Dojima does not see how, without him around to catalyze the conversation, reservation hangs heavy in the air between Souji and Nanako, or how Souji's first meal in Inaba is made to feel less celebratory than it is elegiac. He does not see the first of their exchanges, in which Nanako explains her father's situation – his status as a detective, his general unreliability in coming home – or how,  even as they speak, homesickness spurs Souji to summon cityscapes behind his eyes, vibrant skylines of glass and metal a hundred times more welcoming than the Dojima living room. He does not see how wildly apparent it is to Souji, even within a few meager hours in Inaba, that this house is no home; worse still, that it hasn't been for quite some time. Nor is Dojima around to see how relieved Souji is to be shown his room and relieved of his conversational duties, as travel and fatigue have put socialization at the bottom of Souji's list of priorities. 

When Dojima comes home in the wee hours of morning, though, he finds Nanako curled up at the foot of the television, and has no problem imagining her more engaged by trivia than by Souji's presence. He is not so dense as to fail to see the problem here, but he is too emotionally constipated to know how to fix it, so he does little more than tuck Nanako into bed and retire to his own.

He dreams of easier times, and wakes to harder ones.

* * *

It's hard to prioritize getting to know Souji, despite his wanting to: on his nephew's first day at his new school, the police are called to investigate a body hanging from a t.v. antennae. The whole of the Inaba police force recognizes the face of Mayumi Yamano where it hangs – jaw slack and deformed by gravity – and the image makes a terrible blankness commence falling through him. Dojima knows immediately, without knowing _how_ , that this can only be the first in a series of Very Bad Things.

By the week's end they find Saki Konishi hanging in the very same fashion, and the sight makes his blood run cold in his veins. When Dojima looks into her vacant eyes he sees a version of his own grim future reflected: he sees himself committed to the business of finding inert bodies, of all this dying being the only life he'll ever have.

The first weeks of May become a long stretch of meaningless days, of canvassing the neighborhood and questioning townspeople, of answering phone calls (always pranks and never funny) and being attacked by news commentators. 

Dojima is not even safe in dreams, where the dead never stop visiting him.


	6. Chapter 6

**VI.**

In the way of most things that are ultimately good for you, Dojima _hates_ Souji's presence at first. It has everything to do with the kid’s uncanny ability to end up in the wrong places at the worst of times. Everything to do with the fact that whenever Dojima is faced with an "incident", it's common knowledge that Souji can only be one step or two behind.

It's almost inconceivable that he is one of the means by which Dojima’s house becomes a home.

Souji accomplishes this in increments, befriending Nanako first. Within his first few weeks of being here, Dojima is hit by a barrage of “big bro” this and “big bro” that. Dojima himself is harder to crack: when he is first able to make time for Souji, Dojima bullheadedly subjects him to interrogations about his circle of friends or his frequent trips to the electronics department.

But as time wears on, Souji is able to find his way in. It’s hard for Dojima not to be endeared by his earnestness, his diligence, his charm; and Dojima soon comes to understand that Souji is one of those individuals that people flock to in the hopes that something of him will wear off on them.

Dojima accepts his presence begrudgingly, as he accepts all blessings. Still, once Souji has engrained himself in his life, he knows there is not one thing he would trade his presence for.

* * *

The other means by which Dojima’s house becomes a home is Adachi, and Dojima knows he is in trouble when he brings him home to meet the kids.

Nearing the end of a particularly grueling day, Dojima extends an invitation to Adachi for dinner and tries to make it sound casual when it is anything but. The truth is that in the years after Chisato's accident, the only people to cross the threshhold of the Dojima's doorway have been family – Nanako's grandparents, Dojima’s sister, or any number of assorted aunts and uncles or cousins that Dojima saw once at the wake and has since lost track of – which is why it feels so foreign to see Adachi's pair of weathered loafers kicked off in the entrance.

Mawkish old thing that it is, Dojima's heart can't help but to seize.

Tonight, the draw is takeaway sushi, Dojima's treat. Souji, Nanako, and Adachi fold around the chabudai, as eager to eat as they are to celebrate one of his rare nights off.

The house is alive, so full with such animated chatter that Dojima feels as if he has finally come  _home_  after a nightmarish time abroad. Nanako is talking to everyone gathered about her various school projects and successes, and Adachi is brazenly encouraging her to take the easy way out of her coursework in the future, bragging about a time he wrote a book report armed only with the summary on the back of a novel. Souji is in one of his more pensive moods, and doesn't have a lot to offer beyond an occasional bark of a laugh at Adachi's expense.

Something in Dojima is different, too, even if Ryotaro entered the house in the same physicality as in any other day before. There's something softer in his face and the growling reprimands he throws in Adachi's direction for trying to cultivate another goddamn slacker personality in his daughter. 

He pushes a cucumber roll into his mouth to spite the part of him that still dimly registers the cooking as Not Chisato's, and with his eyes innocuously fixed on Adachi, thinks that maybe it's time he moved on.


	7. Chapter 7

**VII.**

Dojima's personal life gets complicated as the case progresses, and the time comes when, to celebrate the capture of Mitsuo Kubo, Dojima gets invited to Shiroku pub. Hardly the type to turn down a belt, he tucks away the sick, guttural apprehension he has about the case, and accepts.

Sitting on a barstool is where Dojima finds himself getting sloppy – before he’s blackout drunk he finds himself telling Adachi he’s _grateful,_ not only for his help in the case but for their camaraderie. By means of reply he receives something of a flustered, “oh, sheesh,” that Adachi accompanies with a desperate scratch at his collar.

Embarrassed, Dojima engages in defensive mumbling.

“Just take the friggin’ compliment, Adachi.”

* * *

Eventually, Shiroku closes up around them and the buses cease running and Dojima makes the executive decision to bring Adachi back to his place for the night.

The booze has made Dojima slow and sad, and he would be almost reverent if not for his slur and general disarray. Adachi has done, suspiciously, much better, and there is little evidence of his drinking but for the increased volume of his chatter and wandering hands.

Their entrance into the living room is languorous and slow; they move as if underwater. When they flop down on the couch in eerie unison, Dojima finds turning on the t.v. to be such a tremendous effort that it takes ten minutes to accomplish it.

He thinks, in such a distant way that it feels wholly outside of himself, that now might be the opportune moment to interrogate Adachi about his wandering eyes and chagrin smiles, but Dojima can’t quite find the words.

Turns out he doesn’t have to – just as he starts to fumble for words, Adachi’s fingers hitch in Dojima’s hair. 

Years after the accident, Adachi offers to Dojima what he thinks is a reason not to be sad when he lays a trail of careful kisses against the nape of his neck, when he holds Dojima’s body crushingly close. But when he sees how his efforts leave Dojima quaking, shaky, and awful, he comes to understand: some people, he realizes, are sad in the face of all rationality; worse yet, some people are made this way by love.

“Sir,”

he coos at his superior, and peels Dojima’s hands away when they start digging tracts in his arms.

“Shh, sir, it’s okay.” he says, teeth bared in a predatory flash against the detective’s ear. “We don’t have to do anything right now. I’ll wait as long as it takes.”

Dojima kisses him in reward, in thanks for understanding. The detective’s pecks are clumsy and kind of awkward, the sort of kisses that betray a man four years out of practice. Adachi smiles and Dojima assumes this is at his earnestness, when in fact Adachi’s grin comes from thinking

that if he has to suffer one more night like tonight he’ll kill him.

 

 

 

 


End file.
